I had a postcard from Mike Mansfield once from somewhere in north Africa. It was short and bittersweet, a mere four lines he had remembered from Longfellow, lines that told it all:
And the nights shall be filled with music,
And the cares that infest the day
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Mike and I were young meteorologists together over 30 years ago at Shannon. Few, I think, would say that Mike was a great operational forecaster; he was too disorganised, preoccupied, distracted by a hectic social whirl in which each period on duty seemed a mere recuperative intermezzo between the allegro giocoso movements that comprised his real life. But he had a rare gift which, all other things being equal, and they weren't, would have made him one of the best there ever was.
Mansfield could look briefly at the highs and lows and fronts that decorate the weather map, glance at the other charts for the different levels of the atmosphere, and immediately assimilate a three-dimensional concept of the current atmosphere that would take the rest of us hours of laborious study to construct.
And then he could journey through this virtual world, stopping here and there or zooming in as they do in today's attempts at virtual reality, and know intuitively the most likely way the weather situation would develop.
The same talent was evident in other spheres as well. He could grasp the essence of a piece of music like no one else that I have ever known. He knew when the conductor had got the emphasis exactly right or, alternatively, had missed the point completely; and he could explain exactly what he meant, or even show you on the piano how it could be done, and it was so crystal clear that one despaired that one had not seen it all along. And in poetry, too, he could distinguish the bogus and the mediocre from the real thing, sometimes in a way that would surprise.
Mike stole away last week. In his latter years one could almost hear him thinking about
. . . the Junes that were warmer than these are,
The waves were more gay,
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
Those who have known Mike Mansfield only in his last decade may find it hard to recognise the vitality, the exuberance, and the intellectual promise so sadly not fulfilled, all of which were so irresistible to those of us who knew him well when he was young. We who knew him then shall not send to know for whom the bell tolls.